The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

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Product Description
Winner of the 2007 Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger

A delightfully dark English mystery, featuring precocious young sleuth Flavia de Luce and her eccentric family tree.

The summer of 1950 hasn’t offered up anything out of the ordinary for eleven-year-ancient Flavia de Luce: bicycle explorations around the village, keeping tabs on her neighbours, relentless battles with her older sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, and brewing up poisonous concoctions while plotting revenge in their home’s abandoned Victorian chemistry lab, which Flavia has claimed for her own.

But then a series of mysterious events gets Flavia’s attention: A dead bird is establish on the doormat, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. A mysterious late-night visitor argues with her aloof father, Colonel de Luce, behind clogged doors. And in the early morning Flavia finds a red-headed weirder lying in the cucumber patch and watches him take his dying breath. For Flavia, the summer starts in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw: “I wish I could say I was worried, but I wasn’t. Reasonably the contrary. This was by far the most appealing thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”

Did the weirder die of poisoning? There was a piece missing from Mrs. Mullet’s custard pie, and none of the de Luces would have dared to eat the dreadful thing. Or could he have been killed by the family tree’s loyal handyman, Dogger… or by the Colonel himself! At that moment, Flavia commits herself to solving the crime — even if it means keeping information from the village police, in order to protect her family tree. But then her father confesses to the crime, for the same reason, and it’s up to Flavia to free him of suspicion. Only she has the ingenuity to follow the clues that reveal the victim’s identity, and a conspiracy that reaches back into the de Luces’ murky past.

A painstakingly entertaining romp of a novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is inventive and quick-witted, with tongue-in-cheek humour that transcends the macabre seriousness of its theme.Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, April 2009: It’s the beginning of a bone idle summer in 1950 at the sleepy English village of Bishop’s Lacey. Up at the fantastic house of Buckshaw, aspiring chemist Flavia de Luce passes the time tinkering in the laboratory she’s inherited from her deceased mother and an eccentric fantastic uncle. When Flavia discovers a murdered weirder in the cucumber patch outside her bedroom window early one morning, she decides to place aside her flasks and Bunsen burners to solve the crime herself, much to the chagrin of the local authorities. But who can blame her? What else does an eleven-year-ancient science sensation have to do when left to her own devices? With her widowed father and two older sisters far too distant with their own pursuits and passions—stamp collecting, adventure novels, and boys respectively—Flavia takes off on her trusty bicycle Gladys to catch a murderer. In Alan Bradley’s critically acclaimed debut mystery, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, adult readers will be really charmed by this fearless, amusing, and unflappable kid sleuth. But don’t be fooled: this carefully plotted detective novel (the first in a new series) features plenty of unexpected twists and turns and loads of tasty period detail. As the pages glide by, you’ll be rooting for this curious combination of Harriet the Spy and Sherlock Holmes. Go yet to be, take a bite. –Lauren Nemroff

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A Q&A with Alan Bradley

Question: With the publication of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, you’ve become a 70-year-ancient-first time novelist. Have you permanently had a passion for writing, or is it more of a recent development?

Alan Bradley: Well, the Roman leader Seneca once said something like this: “Hang on to your young enthusiasms–you’ll be able to use them better when you’re older.” So to place it briefly, I’m taking his advice.

I really spent most of my life effective on the technical side of television production, but want to reflect that I’ve permanently been a writer. I ongoing writing a novel at age five, and have written articles for various publications all my life. It wasn’t until my early retirement, though, that I ongoing writing books. I published my memoir, The Shoebox Bible, in 2004, and then ongoing effective on a mystery about a reporter in England. It was during the writing of this tale that I stumbled across Flavia de Luce, the main character in Sweetness.

Q: Flavia certainly is an appealing character. How did you come up with such a forceful, precocious and entertaining personality?

AB: Flavia walked onto the page of another book I was writing, and simply hijacked the tale. I was really well into this additional book–about three or four chapters–and as I introduced a main character, a detective, there was a point where he was required to go to a country house and interview this colonel.

I got him up to the driveway and there was this girl sitting on a camp stool doing something with a pad and a pencil and he stopped and questioned her what she was doing and she said “writing down license number plates“ and he said “well there can’t be many in such a place“ and she said, “well I have yours, don’t I? “ I came to a stop. I had no thought who this girl was and where she came from.

She just materialized. I can’t take any credit for Flavia at all. I’ve never had a character who came that much to life. I’ve had characters that tend to tell you what to do, but Flavia grabbed the controls on page one. She sprung full-blown with all of her attributes–her passion for poison, her father and his history–all in one package. It surprised me.

Q: There aren’t many adult books that feature child narrators. Why did you want Flavia to be the voice of this novel?

AB: People probably marvel, “What’s a 70-year-ancient-man doing writing about an 11-year-ancient-girl in 1950s England? “ And it’s a honest question. To me, Flavia embodies that kind of hotly burning flame of our young years: that time of our lives when we’re just starting out, when anything–absolutely anything!–is within our capabilities.

I reflect the reason that she manifested herself as a young girl is that I realized that it would really be a lot of fun to have somebody who was virtually invisible in a village. And of course, we don’t listen to what children say–they’re permanently asking questions, and nobody pays the slightest attention or thinks for a minute that they’re going to do anything with the information that they let slip. I wanted Flavia to take fantastic advantage of that. I was also intrigued by the possibilities of dealing with an unreliable narrator; one whose motives were not permanently on the up-and-up.

She is an amalgam of burning enthusiasm, curiosity, energy, young idealism, and frightening fearlessness. She’s also a very real menace to anyone who thwarts her, but fortunately, they don’t generally realize it.

Q: Like Flavia, you were also 11 years ancient in 1950. Is there anything autobiographical about her character?

AB: Somebody pointed out the fact that both Flavia and I lacked a parent. But I wasn’t aware of this tie during the writing of the book. It simply didn’t cross my mind. It is right that I grew up in a home with only one parent, and I was allowed to run pretty well free, to do the kinds of things I wanted. And I did have extremely intense interests then–things that you get all ears on. When you’re that age, you sometimes have a fantastic enthusiasm that is very deep and very narrow, and that is something that has permanently intrigued me–that world of the 11-year-ancient that is so quickly lost.

Q: Your tale evokes such a plain setting. Had you spent much time in the British countryside before writing this book?

AB: My first trip to England didn’t come until I went to London to receive the 2007 Debut Dagger Award, so I had never even stepped foot in the country at the time of writing Sweetness. But I have permanently loved England. My mother was born there. And I‘ve permanently felt I grew up in a very English household. I had permanently wanted to go and had dreamed for many years of doing so.

When I finally made it there, the England that I was seeing with my eyes was reasonably unlike the England I had imagined, and yet it was the same. I realized that the differences were precisely persons differences between real life, and the simulation of real life, that we make in our detective novels. So this was an opportunity to make on the page this England that had been in my head my whole life.

Q: You have five more books lined up in this series, all coming from Delacorte Press. Will Flavia age as the series goes on?

AB: A bit, not very much. I reflect she’s going to remain in the same age bracket. I don’t really like the thought of Flavia as an older teenager. At her current age, she is such a concoction of contradictions. It’s one of the things that I very much like about her. She’s eleven but she has the wisdom of an adult. She knows everything about chemistry but nothing about family tree relationships. I don’t reflect she’d be the same person if she were a few years older. She certainly wouldn’t have access to the drawing rooms of the village.

Q: Do you have a sense of what the next books in the series will be about?

AB: The second book, The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, is finished, and I’m effective on the third book. I have a all-purpose thought of what’s happening in each one of the books, because I wanted to focus on some bygone aspect of British life that was still there in the ’50s but has now vanished. So we have postage stamps in the first one… The second book is about the travelling puppet shows on the village green. And one of them is about filmmaking–it sort of harks back to the days of the classic Ealing comedies with Alec Guinness and so into the world.

Q: Not every leader garners such immediate success with a first novel. After only completing 15 pages of Sweetness, you won the Dagger award and within 8 days had secured book deals in 3 countries. You’ve since secured 19 countries. Enthusiasm continues to grow from every angle. How does it feel?

AB: It’s like being in the glow of a fire. You hope you won’t get burned. I’m not sure how much I’ve realized it yet. I guess I can say I‘m “nearly overwhelmed”–I’m not reasonably overwhelmed, but I’m getting there. Every day has something new happening, and communications pouring in from people all over. The book has been getting wonderful reviews and touching people. But Flavia has been touching something in people that generates a response from the heart, and the most regularly mentioned word in the reviews is like–how much people like Flavia and have taken her in as if she’s a long-lost member of their family tree, which is certainly very, very gratifying.

(Photo © Jeff Bassett)

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